If you start with a Mafia open world approach or maybe initially it was supposed to be actually sandboxy with all the distracting crap that destroys every main story and urgency, reworking that to some linear levels can't be super easy....??? It possibly would have even added new problems and games as far as I understand are very unfinished for a very long time, so the decision to maybe drop it, would have needed to be made way before it was clear that they won't get it right. Alan Wake was turned from open world to very sealed off segments inside that world. Possibly loading less at the same time, make background data streaming either obsolete or far less demanding. Might have been more easy since it anyway was a rather small town with just a few surroundings which can be easier cut into pieces once they realised that they kinda don't get an actual open world running. With a bunch of delays iirc. But Mindseye probably had this much larger city modelled before gameplay mechanics problems got obvious. The city itself seems even alright, so the bugs would not have disappeared just because they might have needed less people working on the city model. I guess sometimes a model needs to be adapted to avoid some bug and unwanted behavior, but I guess mostly that work, also the cinematics and mocap or whatever, was done well, just the other actual gameplay departments failed. So I doubt working within a more limited more linear world would have changed much or even anything when that decision is made too late. If the bugs resulted because a ton of people worked on stuff that would have been needed in a sandboxy open world, which isn't there, possibly a ton of time was wasted, but then it was probably already too late for changing the core world, breaking it apart and approach everything a bit different.
If and I say if they had a large gray box open world already.
Cutting it into smaller segments is childs play.
From the large gray box they should have already spotted that the open world simulations were doing some funky shit, why they pushed forward is likely cuz they thought they would fix it later.
But instead of trying to suffer with that, just cut that world up for the bespoke missions, the open world sections in campaign are already super restrictive (instafail conditions are easy to meet) it seems super pointless that the world even exists.
If they didnt spot the game was broken by the time they had finished modelling the city they were fucked from the get go, cuz management should have clocked it pretty early and they should have said forget open world, lets keep it smaller.
Our NPCs are retarded and the open world simulations break too too often, lets put our best foot forward and update later if we really really really really really want to have an open world.
Close it off.
THe missions generally play out well enough, lets keep those going, the chases ehhh......lets use invisible walls instead of instafails.
That way gamers have less chance of finding our goofy open world stuff.
Mafia 2s open world isnt rich with stuff, but the simulations work and while not amazing by todays standards it did feel like you were in a living world, the whole get here go there as the story progesses really worked for it in the sense you could feel like Vito was rising up the ranks as you stop being a delivery guy, stop being a driver and start being made.
In this the open world is only there to embarrass the devs, it adds nothing.
